Posts Tagged ‘Central Bank’

As I used to report on the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) as a financial journalist in Switzerland, I remain interested in certain clients it has (they’re all central banks). Take Argentina for example. It holds nearly all its reserves at the BIS, which is unusual – most other central banks keep about 4%.

Argentina does this because at the BIS its money is protected from attachment by unpaid creditors. I’ll return to this in a later blog. It’s the subject of arcane arguments in American courts at present. If you look at http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/tag/argentina/, you’ll see what I mean.

Paraguay is another case, and it’s more topical – see my two recent blogs. It holds all its reserves at the BIS, also to protect them from creditors it decided not to pay.

Last week that did not deter a good number of investors from subscribing to Paraguay’s first-ever public international bond issue. The risk is theirs, you may say. However it does uncannily remind me of the years leading up to the crash of 2008, when banks sold little-explained investment vehicles to gullible investors who did not understand them and asked no questions because of their greed for high yields.

In Paraguay’s case, lead manager Citibank did not inform subscribers in the prospectus that the country keeps all its reserves at the BIS, let alone why. So if the next Paraguayan government repudiates the debt – this has happened several times in the past and the next election is in April – investors were not made aware that a key means of legal redress is blocked.

The ratings agencies were not much put out by this. S&P’s BB- rating and Moody’s Ba3 seem not too bad.

A week before the bond was launched, I myself asked the Paraguayan Finance Minister: “How will you convince potential bondholders that a future Paraguayan Government will not repudiate the bond issue transaction and protect itself from claims by accumulating further funds at the BIS?”

I received no answer, even though the Central Bank had been communicating with me before. Towards the end of last year, Paraguayan ministers were saying in the local media the bond would be launched in mid-February. Now it has popped out just after the New Year. Looks like a rushed job.

Are we at the start of a new cycle of peddling dubious assets which nobody can quite fathom? History shows repentance never lasts more than a few years. I sense the first puffs into a new bubble.